Who would be a farmer’s wife?

On the opening page of The Farmer’s Wife, Helen Rebanks quotes George Eliot’s famous passage from Middlemarch. Dorothea adds to ‘the growing good of the world’ through her ‘unhistoric acts’ and by having ‘lived faithfully a hidden life’. With this enchanting, funny, fearless book, Rebanks brings her own ‘unhistoric’ life unequivocally out of hiding.

She lives with her husband James (a bestselling writer) and their four children in the Lake District on their farm shared with six sheepdogs, two ponies, 20 chickens, 500 sheep and 50 cattle. Writing in the present tense, she describes the rhythm of her day, from the quietness of the slow-awakening farmhouse at dawn through the increasing clamour of the daylight hours until the peace of night falls.

Being also the daughter and granddaughter of farmers, she remembers the old agricultural world and the rituals of her childhood, including making marmalade while hoisted high on a chair in her mother’s kitchen.